Those of us of that certain age will immediately understand the reference.  For those of you under that age....

The crew for yesterday's voyage was the Junior Logician and myself.  Our destination?  The West Valley City DMV Drivers License Testing station.  Yes, the Junior Logician has hit that magical milestone - he is now a driver!  We decided to go yesterday morning as it was a late school start day.  We figured that if we went early enough there would not have been that big of a line - oh were we mistaken.  There was already a block long line when we arrived at 6:45 am for the 7am opening!  Still we figured it was doable after all - they would be fully staffed and not backlogged like they would be closer to the end of the day.  After all, we didn't need to take the written or driving test - he had passed those in his driver's ed class.  No - all we needed to do was get the picture, take the eye exam and pay.  That's won't take too long...right????  Oh were we mistaken.  Getting through the line to fill out the drivers license application and get the picture only took about 30 minutes which was not bad.  However we spent the next 2 1/2 hours waiting to have our number called for the requisite 5 minutes of eye exam and having his documentation examined (for the 3rd time) to make sure he was eligible to get the license!

It wasn't that the workers there were ill-prepared for the crowd - they were very well prepared.  Of the 14 available windows, 10 were open and taking customers.  It wasn't that they weren't working hard - they were.  It was just that the mind-numbing bureaucracy required that the forms be checked and rechecked and rechecked every time someone touched them that slowed everything down to a crawl.

Even with the size of the crowd at the beginning of the day (which finally did slow down around 10am) we could have been in and out of there in 90 minutes had the process been more streamlined.  However, when you have to have three sets of hands go through the same paperwork three times....that triples the time it takes to complete the process.

This is the type of bureaucracy that the Congress and the President want to put in charge of our health care delivery system.  The Junior Logician and I were at the DMV for a little over three hours yesterday for something as simple as a drivers license.  It was an annoyance - it was an inconvenience (the Junior missed his first period class and I missed an hour of work) but that is all.  Imagine how bad that would have been if we had been there for a life threatening emergency.  Something to think about as the President renews his push for a government take over of health care!